Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 1999-2010 by Geoff Dyer

Jake Kerridge on Working the Room: Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer, a
collection of pieces on everything from doughnuts to Paris Fashion Week.

By Jake Kerridge

12:38PM GMT 30 Nov 2010

Geoff Dyer intended his first collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes (1999), to serve as proof of how in his writing career he “had avoided any focus, specialism or continuity except that dictated by my desire to write about whatever I happened to be interested in at any given moment”, resisting his publisher’s scheme to find some way of “passing off these bits and bobs as a coherent book”. This new collection is similarly heterogeneous, covering topics such as photography, literary criticism, jazz, techno, hotel sex, the 2004 Olympics and the search for the perfect doughnut.

And yet with his repeated praise of artists who shy away from underlying themes in search of whatever might take their fancy, Dyer lends this hodgepodge a thematic coherence. He collects literary grasshoppers, hunts loose baggy monsters: it’s these unschematic, undogmatic artists who are best able to delineate human experience.

So the “hard-won craftsmanship” of John Cheever’s short stories “worked against his being able to plumb the complex depths of his being. Only in the shapeless privacy of his journal could he do that.” In the work of Rebecca West, “tone … takes over some of the load-bearing work of structure”.

Dyer once suggested, in Out of Sheer Rage (described here as “some kind of half-assed book about D H Lawrence”), that “Lawrence’s prose is at its best when it comes closest to notes … everything is written – rather than noted and then written – as experienced”.

Although he has a good word for the artfulness of Richard Avedon’s photographs, he prefers it when what the artist sees is unmediated in the work. Hence his admiration for the way Rodin taught himself to draw people without taking his eyes from them: “He wanted nothing – not even himself – to impede the current passing between the model and the paper.”

One wonders to what extent Dyer is himself concerned with representing the unmediated truth in his personal essays. In the book’s final piece, about how he met and wooed his wife, he recalls requesting an unusual prenup at their low-key wedding: that he “be free to write anything I wanted about us and our relationship, irrespective of whether it was true”.

Readers who insist on absolute accuracy in autobiographical writing may be irritated. How much Cheeveresque craftsmanship goes into these depictions of shapeless experience?

Did the teenage Geoff really have an argument with his father that ended with his mother being accidentally elbowed in the nose? We shouldn’t care: whether it happened or not, it is an affecting way of dramatising the true nature of Dyer’s awkward relationship with his non-intellectual parents.

As he put it in his travel book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It: “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.”

Dyer is not really a reporter and his piece on Paris fashion week for Vogue, stuffed with ingenious theories and gags, could have been written without his actually having been there. It is as a critic and memoirist that he excels, equally shrewd and elegant whether he is appreciating art or depreciating himself.